[Electromotive]

The Celera 500L: A 6 seater business aircraft with the fuel efficiency of a car!

In the age of turbofans, scramjets, and ion engines, someone decided to make a flying machine by strapping wings and a V12 to a bullet shaped fuselage. And now he is making high-flying claims. If those claims turn out to be true, this thing will be a game changer.

This futuristic flying machine is the Celera 500L from Otto Aviation - an American startup. It is a mid wing monoplane with a five blade propeller in a pusher configuration. It is going to be marketed as a business and utility aircraft with 6 passenger seats. On paper, it just doesn't beat every turbofan and turboprop equipped jet, it bludgeons them to death. These are the claims Otto Aviation is making about the Celera 500L. Take a look:

• 5-7 times reduction in operating cost: $328 hourly operating costs - a comparable jet aircraft costs $2,100 per hour
• 8 times lower fuel consumption: 18–25 mpg fuel economy, while a comparable jet aircraft gets 2 – 3 mpg
• Cruise speeds equivalent to similar-sized jet aircraft
• Seating capacity for 6 adults and 4,500 nautical mile range
• Supposed to be priced in the same bracket as the hot selling Honda Jet

If the final product is even within 90% of those numbers, it is a great deal and will fly off the tarmac. Escuze moi for the puns, por favor.



Otto Aviation has one flying prototype with tail number N818WM. They have carried out 31 test flights since 2018.

Magic! How?
According to its creators, the laminar design of the Celera 500L offers drastic reduction in drag over traditional aircraft designs thanks to its unique shape and laminar flow surfaces. The design of the Celera fuselage takes advantage of an optimum length-to-width ratio to maximize laminar flow. These benefits do not scale well for large jet transports and are therefore well suited for a small craft like the Celera. The 52-foot-long, glider-like wing gives the Celera 500L a glide ratio of 22 to 1.



Because the tolerances necessary to achieve laminar flow are so fine - even the protruding heads of rivets holding wing skins in place can cause airflow to become turbulent thus the company fabricates all of the airframe parts in its composite shop. The wings and empennage are carbon fiber, and while the fuselage of the prototype was made of fiberglass because it was cheaper, it too will be carbon fiber on the production model. Components such as the avionics and pusher propeller are bought off the shelf.

Engine:
The Celera 500 L is powered by the RED A03 V12 four-stroke aircraft diesel engine designed and built by RED Aircraft GmbH. The engine powers a five blade propeller in a pusher configuration. Those bulges at the back are nacelles housing the radiators for the engine.



RED A03 Engine Specifications:
Liquid cooled V12, twin 6-cylinder bank, capable of independent operation with mutually independent critical engine sub-systems for each bank. If there’s a problem in one bank, the other continues to provide power. Besides this safety enhancement, the engine boasts extreme fuel efficiency.

• Type certification approval granted via EASA (TC.E.150) and FAA (E00092EN)
• Certified to operate on readily available Jet A1 and biodiesel
• Capable of 550+ takeoff horsepower and best-in-class fuel efficiency
• Controlled via fully redundant electronic engine control unit with single power control lever reducing pilot workload
• Lightweight, all-aluminum design

Team:
Otto Aviation was founded by William Otto in 2008. He is not an aeronautical engineer but was a scientist at Los Alamos National Labs and North American Aviation.
David Bogue is the CTO. Bogue left Boom Supersonic, another aviation startup, to join Otto after his aerodynamic consulting work for the company convinced him that the 500L was destined to be a winner because it beat the competition in three areas - less drag due to laminar flow, improved performance from the thin, high-aspect-ratio wing, and better fuel economy from the piston engine.
The chief test pilot is Bjarni Tryggvason, an Icelandic-born engineer and former Canadian Space Agency astronaut.



Criticism:
Otto is making some tall claims, obviously there are going to be critics. Here is what they have to say:

The airplane sounds too good to be true. “I want to believe, but it sounds like a tall order,” says Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis for Teal Group. “Getting something airborne is the easy part. But getting something certified is a long process that inevitably results in changes, which, of course, can impair ambitious performance goals.”

Source

The principal claim made for the Celera is that it supports an unusual amount of laminar flow and therefore has unprecedentedly low drag. I ran the sketchy information I have through a performance-calculation program in order to see if I could guess the assumptions on which the performance projections were based...Strangely, even using the full 500 hp, I could not get the computer to yield a top speed of more than 300 knots at 30,000 feet, and it gave a more trucklike than carlike 10.8 miles per gallon. (Incidentally, jet fuel is about 10 percent denser than avgas, and so there is more energy in a gallon.) Shaking the monitor didn’t help.

Source


When bullets fly!


The Celera 500L is yet to receive all necessary FAA clearances and Otto Aviation is looking for capital injection to take the project into production.

There have been similar prototypes in the past, but none made the claims Otto is making, see Douglas XB-42 Mixmaster and Northrop XP-56.

That's all. Thanks for reading.

[MinivanDriver]

I hope they make good on their promise. Truly revolutionary. The guy behind it seems to have solid engineering credentials. He has been at it for well over a decade and seems to be genuinely driven by his passion quite unlike some unscrupulous folks who make tall claims to get investments and valuations. The engine can run on Jet A. So one of the quoted sources is incorrect in that regard. If they are able to prove the redundancy in the engine design, that in itself is revolutionary irrespective of the fuel efficiency or speed.